Mental Ray room test

[harryhood]

I'm testing some lighting solutions using mental ray in max 8. I've used mario malagrino's tutorial http://www.mariomalagrino.com/illuminationtutorial.pdf

I couldn't get the photometric lights to work (i've modeled to scale), they are super bright really close, then get really dark (for the fill light coming from the windows). I've followed this tut before and had good results. so I've replaced them with mr area spot in the images below, and also tried mr omni for the same purpose. I also have the main mr area spot as the sunlight.

I've used FG with samples: 400 and max bounces: 2 for the images below. I also added some spheres and cubes.

I'm having problems with the self illuminated box from the tutorial which is placed at the window for a glow. also, the geometry around the window frames looks really flat.

any tips or crits so far? I've got a ways to go, I'm working on my mental ray skills so let me have it. thanks.





ETA: the bg is much more yellow then it looked on my laptop, so ignore that for now, I'm not worried about the color just yet.

[innerdream]

Did you try and turn down the illuminating box a bit to get detail back on your window? Looks pretty bright.

[harryhood]

I don't even have the illuminating box present in the image, I gave up on it. I just changed the default background color to a white/yellowish color in the environment settings. I plan on putting in a background photo later with photoshop.

[innerdream]

Oh...my bad.

[Brian Bradley]

Hey Josh,

I think the problem is that the render could use some
exposure control applied to it! (Shameless plug below)

Problem is that Max 8's controls were pretty awful, it
was a big deal when Max 9 fixed things to work very
sweetly with MR.

I would suggest getting the lighting levels up a little
more, save out to a floating point file, then using some
post production to get the exposure nicely balanced out.

Plug = http://www.mentalboutmax.co.uk/Html/...s_Release.html
This is Max 9 only though!!

[harryhood]

Thanks Brian, I've already started playing with exposure and the brightness in photoshop a little. Haven't tweaked any exposure controls in max though.

Does anyone have an idea why my photometric area lights aren't working properly? I scaled them to fit to the windows, but they are blown out real close then get immediately dark giving no more illumination. I like the setup I have now with the mr area spots instead, but I was just curious for future reference on what may be causing those photometric lights to behave like that. I've modeled to scale.